extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.To commence – Alex Gibney is the highly acclaimed director of documentaries Zero Days, Taxi to the Dark Side, Scientology & the Prison of Belief, & most notably, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (to mention a few).
2010’s Client 9 remains almost an obscurity in his illustrious portfolio that was only just recently bought to my attention by a fellow journalist.
I was particularly excited about this one as it has been an increasingly enthralling & necessary point of investigation for me due to the case’s entailments & entanglements, & the greater impacts of them on the way the world is run.
Furthermore, the case has almost become an enigma, with almost zero follow-up or retrospective examination or reference (which just makes me even more suspicious of the scope & gravity attached).
These suspicions proved well roused.
This documentary is momentous! ….. for a whole fleet of reasons.
Let’s start with the leading character, the Luv Gov, the Sheriff of Wall Street, the Scourger in Chief; former NY Governor – Eliot Spitzer.
A well-to-do Jewish kid from the Bronx, with a father in real estate. Posh school, good grades, joins the Dems. 8 years as attorney general before becoming governor of New York around 2007. So far so same old.
But something was dramatically different & wildly radical (by accepted standards) in Eliot Spitzer.
As attorney general, Spitzer wanted to treat high-end white collar crime, especially financial & bank related, as seriously as street crime.
He wanted to make white-collar/financial crime a priority & to aggressively & energetically go after the culprits, who had basically been luxuriating on their cardboard-regulators beanbags, nursing super complacency & de-facto immunity in a kind of fat-cat fiscal free-for-all.
Extremely sharp, extremely earnest & extremely energetic, he assembled a task-force of well disciplined lawyers & legal investigators – & they just started fucking shredding-ass! I mean man, they mopped those Wall Street bitches the fuck-up!!! head rollin’! Bodies drop! A crusade. As the documentary reveals, Spitzer & his crew were getting things done in months, that would of taken other prosecutors years! This was a serious scourge! A clean-up! Game over! It was actually happening, in progress, the most grievous offenders, the biggest looters & wealth negators were actually getting it for the corruption & criminality they so regularly committed.
& Spitzer’s ambitions were even greater – he wanted to fundamentally change the system of financial governance, to stem the pillage, enforce the law, remove the invincibilities & impunities of the Wall Street bandits – & inevitably – within that process – redistribute wealth & create a much better living standard & society for the majority populace.
It wasn’t a gimmick, they were felling felons & ripping the goons of greed a new one with both aplomb and acuity.
Spitzer & his task force started to seriously frighten Wall Street & corporate America. So comfortable with “getting away with it”, so normalized, ingrained & regular was the bandit ideology, so thick the layer of corrupt protection, & so alien was the event of any prosecutions or consequences for the suit-and-tie thieves that Spitzer became a mutual menace.
Powerful enemies were acquired, not least when Spitzer took on Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, then the largest corporate CEO in America as chairman of AIG. They caught Greenberg out, with recorded evidence, cooking the books & other manipulation/fraud/corruption related charges, & Spitzer was going in for the kill.
& then, “extracurricular corruption” of the “too rigged to fail” type was invoked (Spitzer & team were pressed to desist & hand the case over to another prosecutor (corruptocrat patsy Michael Garcia) who then dropped the case against Greenberg once it was under his control. However, the scandal was enough to get Greenberg removed as chairman from AIG.
Another Wall Street moneyman, friend of Greenberg, & staunch opponent of Eliot Spitzer was CEO Ken Langone. Both these characters feature willingly in this documentary, & as Langone earnestly confirms – Wall Street was “terrified” of Spitzer.
Again, this is serious shit…the problem was being addressed & restituted after a decades long approach that was so soft-touch it might as well of been masturbatory.
Real change, real justice, real “law & order” – with some of the biggest & most lucrative offenders in the crosshairs for a once (Spitzer had also gone after & successfully prosecuted multinationals for air & water pollution).
What’s more, Spitzer was popular among both Democrats & Republicans, as well as the public, & for even higher stakes, was doing everything right to pave his way towards presidency. Can you imagine?
Powerful enemies.
Corporate America & Wall Street & the banking sector were horrified. They had a lot to lose. They had common ground. They had absurd money & power.
Spitzer needed to be eliminated. His huge popularity & inspirational actions would prove extremely difficult to discredit.
We have been here before …. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jeremy Corbyn, Salvador Allende, Bernie Sanders, João Goulart & the Coup of 64, Lula da Silva & Dilma Rousseff, Mohammed Morsi, both John & Bobby Kennedy, Patrice Lamumba, Yitzhak Rabin, Phil Shiner, Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union etc.
murder, fabrication, smear, abnormal, underhand, untruthful, undemocratic … anomalous chicanery, subterfuge, blackmail, sabotage, gerrymandering, rigging, misrepresentation, deception & distortion.
On the rare occasion that the system works in the publics favour, dark powers must be effectuated to pervert course.
In this instance, & adding a whole new angle to the feature, is Eliot’s infidelity.
Shock horror! – whilst out successfully leading the countries most crucial battles against unfettered & extreme corporate greed & social destruction, he developed a sweet-tooth for VIP escorts/prostitutes…… like, can the knight not unwind a little between battles? Not that it is at all good exactly, but for the fucks sakes! – Like it actually matters one jot in comparison with the collective common good being steamrolled.
You saved whole generations from debt-bondage, obliterating poverty, living standards extirpation, austerity torture, financial crisis, economic meltdown, inadequate income, crippling inequality, spiralling crime & social deterioration et-al & actually bought the robber barons, wealth terrorists & carrion capitalists to-book – & we are worried about him recharging his power between warfare with a high-end escort?
The single bug on the windshield as you freight the whole colony to safety is a capital offence….abort the rescue.
Well, it was all his enemies needed.
&, without diverting to much, that was the greater error or hazard that the Sheriff should have never given his eager adversaries.
This trivial transgression, barely visible in comparison to the sheer brilliance of the things this guy was crusading on, was greatly inflated, exaggerated, extended, echopraxiated & expounded …. they made mincemeat out of Eliot, & just like with Jeremy Corbyn once the bullshit, derisible, tenuous-as-fuck “antisemitic” bilge-pap had stuck – they just kept hammering it.
& of course, unlike his opponents, Spitzer would be held to the highest angelic standard, & savaged for anything other than such a myth.
Count Colostomy – Drupert Turdcoch’s publications went into hyper-drive over Spitzer, as is predictable from that sick, tumid, evil shit-faucet.
He even hired one of the escorts from the agency – Ashley Dupré
– to become a sex columnist in his pabulum print, the New York Post.
She is revised every time Spitzer makes any effort to resurface.
Unbelievable.
Who else was hired to target the Sheriff? Self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” & Roy Cohn rent-boy – Roger Stone, the leading leper in open-anus corruption.
Unbelievable.
Extracurricular corruption. That is how the whole Kushner, Windsor, Cohn, Stone, Murdoch, Kissinger, Trump, Netanyahu excrement-effigy survive & eliminate or remove all obstacles. “Don’t tell me the law. Tell me the judge”. – Roy Cohn
this documentary is utter dynamite. It is such an important example of the “next level” corruption that deforms, & performs selective-surgery & aberrant-intervention on our politics & living standards. Confiscation. Skew. Contortion.
A few months after Spitzer’s resignation, the financial crash of 2008 occurred. Followed by the bailout. Followed by austerity.
Spitzer was very much on course to stop, or at least seriously challenge, such deranged, harmful, dangerous, annihilating mega malfeasance.
This whole Spitzer episode needs serious attention. Its exposure is heavily minimized & always presented as the disgraced & lustful governor who can now no longer be taken seriously. As the full stretchof the documentaries title reads “you don’t know the real story”.
Transcending the political content, the sheer drama of this doco, Gibney’s expertise, & the cast of characters & their orations is just incredible.
during the hacking scandal & Leveson Enquiry that engulfed & almost destroyed Rupert Murdoch’s empire of poison & scum, Spitzer had quite rightly called for him to be prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the US. Turd would of noted this, & whilst he vigorously defends convicted child rapists such as the disgraced Cardinal George Pell in his squalid rags, & offered fawning series pieces to the notorious necrophile & serial rapist Jimmy Savile, Ashley Dupré’s
single consensual sexual encounter with Spitzer is dragged out & screamed over.
Trump’s litany of rape, sexual assault, child sexualization & rape of minors allegations, with accusers quite literally queuing-up, does not stop Murdoch’s endorsement & crucial support via Fox News.
“don’t tell me the law. Tell me the judge”.
The mass demoralization with politics, is a result of very deliberate & sustained sabotage, rigging, expropriation & mutilation of the system, so it effectively favours the bad guys & works against the peoples, planets interests, welfare & safety.
It has become so corrupt, so entrenched & so regular, that many are totally disillusioned, which is completely understandable.
Anything good gets exterminated by extraordinary measures, even if it means public assassination.
What “true” representations & factually accurate accounts of characters like Spitzer, Corbyn, Sanders, Lula & others (& their massive popularity when performing) demonstrates, is how it should be done & that it can be done. The constant corrupt derailment & targeted destruction of these figureheads/forces for good throughout history by extremely affluent special interest criminal cabals -from assassination to smear – is threatening our survival & future.
Much greater study & familiarity needs to be bestowed at these particular episodes & characters, & the truly demonic degenerates that engineer their downfall.
Client 9 is a vital documentation to one of their worst successes.
Alex Gibney, 2010, Magnolia Pictures/Dogwoof